"We're eyeball to eyeball and I think the other fellow just blinked." -Secretary of State Dean Rusk on the apparent resolution of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.

History can change in the blink of an eye. In Resurrection Day, Brendan DuBoisÌ alternative history thriller, the blink never had a chance to happen. Instead, the Cuban Missile Crisis became the Cuban Conflagration, a rain of nuclear fire that incinerated all of the Soviet Union and choice portions of the United States. Set 10 years after the inferno, the novel presents a U.S. one step away from third world status, dependent on the kindness of its former mother country, Great Britain, pockmarked with black glass craters where cities once existed, and blemished with radioactive hot zones. In a land where food and hope remain in short supply, the press is censored, surviving members of the Kennedy Administration are imprisoned as war criminals, and the immolated young PresidentÌs name is spoken as a curse, a cult keeps alive his name and the possibility of his eventual return.

Existing in this dispirited world is the equally disheartened Carl Landry, a Boston Globe reporter and military veteran with memories heÌd prefer to lose. LandryÌs desultory existence is shaken by the covered-up murder of a derelict, a fellow veteran who somehow held the key to a conspiracy that has its roots in the Cuban crisis and its horrible payoff in the near future. In the best tradition of such stories, Landry neglects his official duties, teams up with a British journalist, and goes off in pursuit of WhatÌs Behind It All. Along the way heÌs attacked, captured, cajoled, entreated, and repeatedly betrayed as he barely clears trapdoor after trapdoor set in his path by author and villains. The hunt eventually leads to an apparently long-deserted Manhattan, soon to be re-opened to the world for repopulation at an unthinkable cost. ItÌs in these scenes, set in the core of what was once the Big Apple, that Resurrection Day is most successful. DuBoisÌs descriptions of a seemingly deserted metropolis are vivid, projecting a tactile sense of isolation and abandonment that only increases when Landry literally goes underground.

The author uses the scenes set in the ÏrealÓ Manhattan to indict the arrogance of unrestrained power and to celebrate the resilience of the ordinary (no, make that extraordinary) citizen. And he does so with a seething, white-hot, quiet anger that never usurps the narrative. In fact, DuBois does a good job of balancing the varied demands posed by melding the rescue tale, the alternate history, the man-on-the-run thriller and the good-old-fashioned ink-stained newshound. ThereÌs cleverness and even fun in the novelÌs restructuring of political and pop cultures (Elvis lives; George Romney maybe isnÌt brainwashed), rage in its savaging of those who would betray democracy and humanity in order to ÎsaveÌ them, breathlessness in its nonstop action, and, at its heart, a faith in people over politics that not only saves the day but makes the book.

 


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